4 ms·

Do you want to learn to program? Or do you enjoy the higher level design ideas? Penetration testing will be closer to what you are doing now from a sysadmin

by sjg007 8y ago

Do you want to learn to program? Or do you enjoy the higher level design ideas? Penetration testing will be closer to what you are doing now from a sysadmin level but you will learn security models and largely write scripts to test systems. I would not be fearful of this role, you can do it. The architecture role will be design oriented. Do you understand what Azure/cloud offers your business? Things to consider: how will you do identity management, backups, security models (VPN etc..), etc... You're goal here will be more at the business level and how you "scale" your IT processes with respect to achieving those goals (and reduce COGs).. Azure is effectively infrastructure as code, which reduces the demand for system administrators since your physical machines are now virtualized. An architect will probably not code very much, penetration tester will write basic scripts to do much of the work... Architect is more about consensus building/collaboration/project management, penetration testing is more of an individual contributor role. These are of course basic descriptions of the roles.. they may vary in implementation wherever you go. Going from help desk to system admin is a bigger leap than sysadmin to pen tester in my opinion. Fear not! If you meet like 50-70% of the reqs you're qualified.

anon0938 8y ago
Im one of the guys that are pushing company to be more cloud friendly. The finance technology is rather behind what is more common today, so we are still behind on a lot of the newer "DevOps" stuff so to say. But yes I do really enjoy the higer level ideas/work that Im doing, of course that entails a lot of "people" and collaboration work but Im really enjoying it. One of my worries as a pentester is that I will go from more of an architecture/sysadmin role to an individual who just deliveres reports to some developer or project leader. I feel like the work I would do will give a lesser impact that the work Im doing now. (If that makes any sense)
- world32 8y ago
  Pen testing is a broad field, you can have some jobs where you will be trying to hack into very important applications or networks and your work will have a huge impact. Or you can have other jobs where you are just running a few vulnerability scans and writing a report based on that. The same as any other field really. I wouldn't worry to much about not being able to code in order to be a pen tester, an advance level of coding really isn't necessary. I would ask why do you want to change your job? Are you unhappy with your current job? It sounds like you enjoy it. Keep this in mind because starting from the bottom as a pen tester will be very difficult if you are coming from a high-level role that you enjoy in another industry - you will have to realllly want to become a pen tester in order to start over from the bottom and work your way up. I say this from experience too as someone who spent about a year as a pen tester but decided to go back to my old career because it was not worth spending years to get to the same level I was already at.

by sjg007 8y ago

anon0938 8y ago

Im one of the guys that are pushing company to be more cloud friendly. The finance technology is rather behind what is more common today, so we are still behind on a lot of the newer "DevOps" stuff so to say. But yes I do really enjoy the higer level ideas/work that Im doing, of course that entails a lot of "people" and collaboration work but Im really enjoying it. One of my worries as a pentester is that I will go from more of an architecture/sysadmin role to an individual who just deliveres reports to some developer or project leader. I feel like the work I would do will give a lesser impact that the work Im doing now. (If that makes any sense)

world32 8y ago
Pen testing is a broad field, you can have some jobs where you will be trying to hack into very important applications or networks and your work will have a huge impact. Or you can have other jobs where you are just running a few vulnerability scans and writing a report based on that. The same as any other field really. I wouldn't worry to much about not being able to code in order to be a pen tester, an advance level of coding really isn't necessary. I would ask why do you want to change your job? Are you unhappy with your current job? It sounds like you enjoy it. Keep this in mind because starting from the bottom as a pen tester will be very difficult if you are coming from a high-level role that you enjoy in another industry - you will have to realllly want to become a pen tester in order to start over from the bottom and work your way up. I say this from experience too as someone who spent about a year as a pen tester but decided to go back to my old career because it was not worth spending years to get to the same level I was already at.